Mass Destruction

The Men and Giant Mines That Wired America and Scarred the Planet

Timothy J. LeCain

Publication Year: 2009

Mass Destruction is the compelling story of Daniel Jackling and the development of open-pit hard rock mining, its role in the wiring of an electrified America, and its devastating environmental effects. This new method of mining, complimenting the mass production and mass consumption that came to define the "American way of life"in the early twentieth century, promised infinite supplies of copper and other natural resources. LeCain deftly analyzes how open-pit mining continues to adversely effect the environment and how, as the world begins to rival American resource consumption, no viable alternatives have emerged.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

When I was a boy growing up in western Montana, my parents took me
and my four brothers to see the Berkeley Pit in Butte, back when it was still
a pit and not a toxic lake. I can still recall the mixture of awe, excitement,
and unease I felt at seeing that shattered industrial landscape, one so different
and seemingly distant from our home in the green and pleasant
Missoula Valley.

One: In the Lands of Mass Destruction

The wooded hills and elegant homes of Woodside, California, at first
might seem an odd place to begin a book about mass destruction technology.
On a warm early summer’s evening in this fashionable community
south of San Francisco, the air smells of fresh-cut grass and eucalyptus. A
light breeze carries a hint of salt air from the ocean ten miles to the west
and stirs the leaves on the tall coastal oaks that blanket the hills a dense
green.

Two: Between the Heavens and the Earth

The autumn of 1902 in the Deer Lodge Valley was like many in southwestern
Montana before and since. The days were mostly dry and warm, the
nights chilly and cloudless. Relatively little rain fell to wash the dust off the
quiet farming valley, and the hay and other crops grew predictably slower
as the daily hours of sunshine grew shorter. This was the typical cycle of
autumn, one that the ranchers and farmers had adapted to and learned to ...

Three: The Stack

The first stop of the specially chartered train that Saturday morning was in
Garrison, a tiny farming and ranching community at the far northern end
of the Deer Lodge Valley. The train then headed south toward Anaconda,
pausing at every small country rail stop along the way to pick up passengers.
Everyone rode free that day, courtesy of the Anaconda, or the Amalgamated
Copper Mining Company, as it was now called. When the train ...

Four: The Pit

No one knows precisely when the change began or who began it. The shift
in language must have been gradual, though the immense physical transformation
itself had occurred with remarkable speed. Regardless, by the
early 1930s the big mountain of copper that people had long referred to as
“the Hill” no longer seemed to warrant that name. True, the remnants of
the old hill of copper still endured along one wall. But it would have been ...

Five: The Dead Zones

Walk through the older parts of Butte’s Mount Moriah Cemetery, pause
now and then to read the names and dates on the gravestones, and it will
not be long before a pattern begins to emerge. On a late winter day in
March, a brittle crust of snow still hides the yellowed cemetery grass. Deep
drifts linger in the shade of the scattered pines where only the tops of the
headstones are visible, poking out of their wells of snow like hard gray ...

Epilogue: From New Delhi to the New West

On a Friday night in Gurgaon, a booming suburb of India’s capital of New
Delhi, honking cars crowd the streets and commuter traffic slows to a
crawl. Above the busy streets and sidewalks, the brightly lit windows of
new air-conditioned malls and office buildings gleam in the gathering
darkness, some with twenty-foot-high illuminated advertisements for
pricey handbags, clothes, and electronics. One of the shiny modern office ...

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